If you’re marketing big brands with hundreds or thousands of locations, are you certain you’re getting model-appropriate local SEO information from your favorite industry sources?

Is your enterprise checking off not just technical basics, but hyperlocalized research to strengthen its entrance into new markets?

Before I started working for Moz in in 2010, the bulk of my local SEO experience had been with small-to-medium business models. Naturally, the advice I was able to offer back then was limited by the scope of my work. But then came Moz Local, and the opportunity to learn more about the more complex needs of valued enterprise customers like Crate & Barrel with more than 170 locations, PAPYRUS with 400, or Bridgestone Corporation with 2000+.

Now, when I’m thumbing through industry tips and tactics, I’m better able to identify when a recommended practice is stemming from an SMB mindset and falling short of enterprise realities, or is truly applicable to all business models. My goal for this post is to offer:

Examples of commonly encountered advice that isn’t really best for big brands

An Enterprise Local SEO Checklist to help you shape strategy for present campaigns, or ready your agency to pursue relationships with bigger dream clients

A state-to-enterprise wireframe for initial hyperlocal marketing research

Not everything you read is for enterprises

When a brand is small, like a single location, family-owned retail shop, it’s likely that a single person at the company can manage the business’ Local SEO, with some free education and a few helpful tools. Large, multi-location brands, just by dint of organizational complexities, are different. Before they even get down to the nitty gritty of building citations, enterprises have to solve for:

Standardizing data across hundreds or thousands of locations

Franchise relationships that can muddy who controls which data and assets

Designating staff to actually manage data and execute initiatives, and building bridges between teams that must work in concert to meet goals

Scaling everything from listings management, to site architecture, to content dev

Dealing with a hierarchy of reports of bad data from the retail location level up to corporate

I am barely scratching the surface here. In a nutshell, the scale of the organization and the scope of the multi-location brand can turn a task that would be simple for Mom-and-Pop into a major, company-wide challenge. And I think it adds to the challenge when published advice for SMBs isn’t labeled as such. Over the years, three common tips I’ve encountered with questionable or no applicability to enterprises include:

Not-for-enterprises #1: Link all your local business listings to your homepage

This is sometimes offered as a suggestion to boost local rankings, because website home pages typically have more authority than location landing pages do. But in the enterprise scenario, sending a consumer from a listing for his chosen location, to a homepage, and then expecting him to fool around with a menu or a store locator widget to finally reach a landing page for the location he’s already designated that he wanted is not respecting his user experience. It’s wasting his time. I consider this an unnecessary risk of conversions.

Simultaneously, failure to fully utilize location landing pages means that very little can be done to customize the website experience for each community and customer. Directly-linked-to landing pages can provide instant, persuasive proofs of local-ness, in the form of real local reviews, news about local sponsorships and events, special offers, regional product highlights, imagery and so much more that no corporate homepage can ever provide. Consider these statistics:

“According to a new study, when both brand and location-specific pages exist, 85% of all consumer engagement takes place on the local pages (e.g., Facebook Local Pages, local landing pages). A minority of impressions and engagement (15%) happen on national or brand pages.” – Local Search Association

In the large, multi-location scenario, it just isn’t putting the customer first to swap out a hoped-for ranking increase for a considerate, well-planned user experience.

Not-for-enterprises #2: Local business listings are a one-and-done deal

I find this advice particularly concerning. I don’t consider it true even for SMBs, and at the enterprise level, it’s simply false. It’s my guess that this suggestion stems from imagining a single local business. They create their Google My Business listing and build out perhaps 20–50 structured citations with good data. What could go wrong?

For starters, they may have forgotten that their business name was different 10 years ago. Oh, and they did move across town 5 years ago. And this old data is sitting somewhere in a major aggregator like Acxiom, and somehow due to the infamous vagaries of data flow, it ends up on Bing, and a Bing user gets confused and reports to Google that the new address is wrong on the GMB listing … and so on and so on. Between data flow and crowdsourced editing, a set-and-forget approach to local business listings is trouble waiting to happen.

Now multiply this by 1,000 business locations. And throw in that the enterprise opened two new stores yesterday and closed one. And that they just acquired a new chain and have to rebrand all its assets. And there seems to be something the matter with the phone number on 25 listings, because they’re getting agitated complaints at corporate. And they received 500 reviews last week on Google alone that have to be managed, and it seems one of their competitors is leaving them negative reviews. Whoa – there are 700 duplicate listings being reported by Moz Local! And the brand has 250 Google Questions & Answers queries to respond to this week. And someone just uploaded an image of a dumpster to their GMB listing in Santa Fe…

Not only do listings have to be built, they have to be monitored for data degradation, and managed for inevitable business events, responsiveness to consumers, and spam. It’s hard enough for SMBs to pull all of this off, but enterprises ignore this at their peril!

Not-for-enterprises #3: Just do X

Every time a new local search feature or best practice emerges, you’ll find publications saying “just do X” to implement. What I’ve learned from enterprises is that there is no “just” about it.

Case in point: in 2017, Google rolled out Google Posts, and as Joel Headley of healthcare practice growth platform PatientPop explained to me in a recent interview, his company had to quickly develop a solution that would enable thousands of customers to utilize this influential feature across hundreds of thousands of listings. PatientPop managed implementation in an astonishingly short time, but typically, at the enterprise level, each new rollout requires countless steps up and down the ladder. These could include achieving recognition of the new opportunity, approval to pursue it, designation of teams to work on it, possible acquisition of new assets to accomplish goals, implementation at scale, and the groundwork of tracking outcomes so that they can be reported to prove/disprove ROI from the effort.

Where small businesses can be relatively agile if they can find time to man-up to new features and strategies, enterprises can become dangerously bogged down by infrastructure and communications gaps. Even something as simple as hyperlocalizing content to the needs of a given community represents a significant undertaking.

The family-owned local hardware store already knows that the county fair is the biggest annual event in their area, and they’ve already got everything necessary to participate with a booth, run a contest, take photos, sponsor the tractor pull, earn links, and blog about it. For the hardware franchise with 3,000 stores, branch-to-corporate communication of the mere existence of the county fair, let alone gaining permission to market around it, will require multiple touches from the location to C-suites, and back again.

Checklist for enterprise local SEO preparedness

If you’re on the marketing team for an enterprise, or you run an agency and want to begin working with these larger, rewarding clients, you’ll be striving to put a checkmark in every box on the following checklist:

☑ Definition of success

We’ve determined which actions = success for our brand, whether this is increases for in-store traffic, sales, phone calls, bookings, or some other metric. When we see growth in these KPIs, it will affirm for us that our efforts are creating real success.

☑ Designation of roles

We’ve defined who will be responsible for all tasks relating to the local search marketing of our business. We’ve equipped these team members with all necessary permissions, granted access to key documentation, have organized workflows, and have created an environment for documentation of work.

☑ Canonical data

We’ve created a spreadsheet, approved and agreed upon by all major departments, that lists the standardized name, address, phone number, website URL, and hours of operation for each location of the company. Any variant information has been resolved into a single, agreed-upon data set for each location. This sheet has been shared with all stakeholders managing our local business listings, marketing, website and social outreach.

☑ Website optimization

Our keyword research findings are reflected in the tags and text of our website, including image optimization. Complete contact information for each of our locations is easily accessible on the site and is accurate. We’ve implemented proper markup, such as Schema or JSON-LD, to ensure that our data is as clear as possible to search engines.

☑ Tracking and analysis

We’ve implemented maximum controls for tracking and analyzing traffic to our website. We’re also ready to track and analyze other forms of marketing, such as clicks stemming from our Google My Business listings traffic being driven to our website by articles on third party sources, and content we’re sharing via social media.

☑ Publishing strategy

Our website features strong basic pages (Home, Contact, About, Testimonials/Reviews, Policy), we’ve built an excellent, optimized page for each of our core products/services and a quality, unique page for each of our locations. We have a clear strategy as to ongoing content publication, in the form of blog posts, white papers, case studies, social outreach, and other forms of content. We have plans for hyperlocalizing content to match regional culture and needs.

☑ Store locator

We’ve implemented a store locator widget to connect our website’s users to the set of location landing pages we’ve built to thoughtfully meet the needs of specific communities. We’ve also created an HTML version of a menu linking to all of these landing pages to ensure search engines can discover and index them.

☑ Local link building

We’re building the authority of our brand via the links we earn from the most authoritative sources. We’re actively seeking intelligent link building opportunities for each of our locations, reflective of our industry, but also of each branch’s unique geography.

☑ Guideline compliance

We’ve assessed that each of the locations our business plans to build local listings for complies with the Guidelines for Representing Your Business on Google. Each location is a genuine physical location (not a virtual office or PO box) and conducts face-to-face business with consumers, either at our locations or at customers’ locations. We’re compliant with Google’s rules for the naming of each location, and, if appropriate, we understand how to handle listing multi-department and multi-practitioner businesses. None of our Google My Business listings is at risk for suspension due to basic guideline violations. We’ve learned how to avoid every possible local SEO pitfall.

☑ Full Google My Business engagement

We’re making maximum use of all available Google My Business features that can assist us in achieving our goals. This could include Google Posts, Questions & Answers, Reviews, Photos, Messaging, Booking, Local Service Ads, and other emerging features.

☑ Local listing development

We’re using software like Moz Local to scale creation of our local listings on the major aggregators (Infogroup, Acxiom, Localeze and Factual) as well as key directories like Superpages and Citysearch. We’re confident that our accurate, consistent data is being distributed to these most important platforms.

☑ Local listing monitoring

We know that local listings aren’t a set-and-forget asset and are taking advantage of the ongoing monitoring SaaS provides, increasing our confidence in the continued accuracy of our data. We’re aware that, if left unmanaged, local business listing data can degrade over time, due to inputs from various, non-authoritative third parties as well as normal data flow across platforms.

☑ In-store strategy

All public-facing staff are equipped with the necessary training to implement our brand’s customer service policy, answer FAQs or escalate them via a clear hierarchy, resolving complaints before they become negative online reviews. We have installed in-store signage or other materials to actively invite consumer complaints in-person, via an after-hours helpline or text message to ensure we are making maximum effort to build and defend our strong reputation.

☑ Review acquisition

We’ve developed a clear strategy for acquiring reviews on an ongoing basis on the review sites we’ve deemed to be most important to our brand. We’re compliant with the guidelines of each platform on which we’re earning reviews. We’re building website-based reviews and testimonials, too.

☑ Review monitoring & response

We’re monitoring all incoming reviews to identify both positive and negative emerging sentiment trends at specific locations and we’re conversant with Net Promoter Score. We’ve created a process for responding with gratitude to positive reviews. We’re defending our reputation and revenue by responding to negative reviews in ways that keep customers who complain instead of losing them, to avoid needless drain of new customer acquisition spend. Our responses are building a positive impression of our brand. We’ve built or acquired solutions to manage reviews at scale.

☑ Local PR

Each location of our brand has been empowered to build a local footprint in the community it serves, customizing outreach to match community culture. We’re exploring sponsorships, scholarships, workshops, conferences, news opportunities, and other forms of participation that will build our brand via online links and social mentions as well as offline WOM marketing. We’re continuously developing cohesive online/offline outreach for maximum impact on brand recognition, rankings, reputation, and revenue.

☑ Social media

We’ve identified the social platforms that are most popular with our consumer base and a best fit for our brand. We’re practicing ongoing social listening to catch and address positive and negative sentiment trends as they arise. We’ve committed to a social mindset based on sharing rather than the hard sell.

☑ Spam-ready

We’re aware that our brand, our listings, and our reviews may be subject to spam, and we know what options are available for reporting it. We’re also prepared to detect when the spammy behaviors of competitors (such as fake addresses, fake negative/positive reviews, or keyword stuffing of listings) are giving them an unfair advantage in our markets, and have a methodology for escalating reports of guideline violations.

☑ Paid media

We’re investing wisely in both on-and-offline paid media and carefully tracking and analyzing the outcomes of online pay-per-click, radio, TV, billboards, and phone sales strategy. We’re exploring new opportunities, as appropriate and as they emerge, like Google Local Service Ads.

☑ Build/buy

When any new functionality (like Google Posts or Google Q&A) needs to be managed at scale, we have a process for determining whether we need to build or acquire new technology. We know we have to weigh the pros/cons of developing in-house or buying ready-made solutions.

☑ Competitive difference-maker

Once you’ve checked off all of the above elements, you’re ready to move forward towards identifying a USP for your brand that no one else in your market has explored. Be it a tool, widget, app, video marketing campaign, newsworthy acquisition, new partnership, or some other asset, this venture will require deep competitive and market research to discover a need that has yet to be filled well by your competitors. If your business can serve this need, it can set your brand apart for years to come.

Free advice, specifically for local enterprises

It’s asserted that customers may forget what you say, but they’ll never forget how you make them feel.

Call me a Californian, but I continue to be amazed by automotive TV spots that show large trucks driving through beautiful creeks (thanks for tearing up precious riparian habitat during our state-wide drought) and across pristine arctic snowfields (instantly reminding me of climate change). Meanwhile, my family have become Tesla-spotters, seeing that “zero emissions” messaging on the tail of every luxury eco-vehicle that passes us by. As consumers, we know how we feel.

Technical and organizational considerations aside, this is where I see one of the greatest risks posed to the local enterprise structure. Insensitivity at a regional or hyperlocal level — the failure to research customer needs with the intention of meeting them — has been responsible for some of the most startling bad news for enterprises in recent recall. From ignored negative reviews across fast food franchises, to the downsizing of multiple apparel retailers who have been unable to stake a clear claim in the shifting shopping environment, brands that aren’t successful at generating positive consumer “feelings” may need to reevaluate not just their local search marketing mindset, but their basic identity.

If this sounds uncomfortable or risky, consider that we are seeing a rising trend in CEOs taking stands on issues of national import in America. This is about feelings. Consumers are coming to expect this, and it feeds down to the local level.

Hyperlocalized market research

If your brand is considering opening a new branch in a new state or city, you’ll be creating profiles as part of your research. These could be based on everything from reading local news to conducting formal surveys. If I were to do something like this for my part of California, these are the factors I’d be highlighting about the region:

California

Enterprises

We’ve been blasted by drought and wildfire. In 2017, alone, we went through 9,133 fires. On a positive note, Indigenous thought-leadership is beginning to be re-implemented in some areas to solve our worst ecological problems (water scarcity, salmon loss, absence of traditional forestry practices).

Can your brand help conserve water, re-house thousands of homeless residents, fund mental health services despite budget cuts, make legal services affordable, provide solutions for increased future safety? What are your green practices? Are you helping to forward ecological recovery efforts at a tribal, city or state level?

We’re grumbling more loudly about tech gentrification. If you live in Mississippi, sit down for this. The average home price in your state is $ 199,028. In my part of California, it’s $ 825,000. In San Francisco, specifically, you’ll need $ 1.2 million dollars to buy a tiny studio apartment… if you can find one. While causes are complex, people I talk with generally blame Silicon Valley.

Can your brand be part of this conversation? If not, you’re not really addressing what is on statewide consumers’ minds. Particularly if you’re marketing a tech-oriented company, taking the housing crisis seriously and coming up with solutions for even a modest amount of relief would certainly be positive and newsworthy.

We’ve turned to online shopping for an interesting variety of reasons. And it’s not just because we’re techie hipsters. The retail inventory in big cities (San Francisco) can be overwhelming to sort through, and in small towns (Cloverdale), the shopping options are too few to meet our basic and luxury desires.

Can your brand thrive in the gaps? If you’re located in a metro area, you may need to offer personal assistance to help consumers filter through options. If you’ve got a location somewhere near small towns, strategies like same-day delivery could help you remain competitive.

We’ve got our Hispanic/Latino identity back. Our architecture, city and street names are daily reminders that California has a lot more to do with Mexico than it ever did with the Mayflower. We may have become part of the U.S. in 1850, but pay more attention to 2014 — the year that our Hispanic/Latino community became the state’s largest ethnic group. This is one of the most vibrant happenings here. At the same time, our governor has declared us a sanctuary state for immigrants, and we’re being sued for it by the Justice Department.

We’re politically diverse. Our single state is roughly the same size as Sweden, and we truly do run the political gamut from A–Z here. Are citizens removing a man-made dam heroically restoring ecology or getting in the way of commerce? You’ll find voices on every side.

Can your brand take the risk of publicizing its honest core values? If so, you are guaranteed to win and lose Californian customers, so do your research and be prepared to own your stance. Know that at a regional level, communities differ greatly. Those TV ads that show trucks running roughshod through fragile ecosystems may fly in some cities and be viewed with extreme distaste in others.

Can your brand employ a significant number of residents and pay them a living wage? Could your entry into a new market lift poverty in a town and provide better financial security? This would be newsworthy! Have ideas for lowering prices? You’ll get some attention there, too.

Obviously, I’m painting with broad strokes here, just touching on some of the key points that your enterprise would need to consider in determining to commence operations in any city or state. Why does this matter? Because the hyperlocalization of marketing is on the rise, and to engage with a community, you must first understand it.

Every month, I see businesses shutter because someone failed to apprehend true local demand. Did that bank pick a good location for a new branch? Yes — the next branch is on the other side of the city. Will the new location of the taco franchise remain open? No — it’s already sitting empty while the beloved taco wagon down the street has a line that spills out of its parking lot all night long.

Summing up

The checklist in this post can help you create an enterprise-appropriate strategy for well-organized local search marketing, and it’s my hope that you’ll evaluate all SEO advice for its fitness to your model. These are the basic necessities. But where you go from there is the exciting part. The creative solutions you find to meet the specific wants and needs of individualized service communities could spell out the longevity of your brand’s success.

Sign up for The Moz Top 10, a semimonthly mailer updating you on the top ten hottest pieces of SEO news, tips, and rad links uncovered by the Moz team. Think of it as your exclusive digest of stuff you don’t have time to hunt down but want to read!

Recently, I tweeted that one tweet from a nonprofit’s CEO was worth more than many tweets by its staff, borrowing a line from trite saying, “A picture is worth 1,000 words.” This prompted a debate with several colleagues, including two nonprofit CEOs. I immediately took it into a branch conversation (a terrific online tool for those of us who need more than 140 characters to discuss something).

What we ended up agreeing on is that, yes, having a nonprofit CEO use social media shows that social media participation is important to the organization from the inside/out; but it is equally important to have all staff involved. This is not an “either/or” argument, but more of a “both/and.” But the main point is, it’s not just about using the tools or getting your nonprofit’s CEO to send out some tweets — it’s about a total redesign of your organization. And it all starts with leaders leading with a network mindset.

Understanding the Network Mindset

So what exactly is a network mindset? It’s a new style of leadership that works through active participation, openness, decentralized decision-making, and collective action. It requires that nonprofit leaders have an awareness of the organization’s networks and are listening to and cultivating these networks in order to achieve impact. It means sharing by default and communicating through a network model, rather than a broadcast model — finding where the conversations are happening, and taking part. It also means using analytics to measure success, and being data-driven to continuously improve.

But it isn’t always quick and easy to do, as CEO of San Francisco Goodwill Debbie Alvarez-Rodriguez shared in a recent presentation about becoming a networked nonprofit. Getting comfortable with social media and giving people a closer look at themselves is the first step for leaders to make the leap into adopting a network mindset. But as Debbie Alvarez-Rodriguez and other nonprofit leaders have discovered, social media isn’t just an engagement platform; it also requires that organizations redesign how they work. Having a multi-channel marketing strategy and competence and comfort using social and mobile tools is important, but organizations also need to incorporate networked practices, requiring leaders to leverage both their professional and organizational networks.

But success can happen for nonprofits if they take small, incremental, and strategic steps. In my forthcoming book, Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, co-authored with KD Paine, we introduce a framework called “Crawl, Walk, Run, Fly” to help nonprofits figure out what incremental steps they need to take to get to the next level of networked nonprofit practice. It’s designed to help them understand and measure the nature of the change process as they move through it. The model below indicates areas where organizations should focus time and learning to move to the next stage.

The Crawl Stage

Crawlers are not using social media consistently or incorporating measurement processes; they also lack a robust communications strategy. Crawlers can be small or large nonprofits that have all the basics in place, but they either lack a social culture or resist transforming from a command-and-control style to a more networked mindset. These nonprofits need to develop a strategy. Even with a communications strategy in place, some organizations may face challenges to adopting a networked way of working. If so, they should start with a discussion of the organizational issues, followed by codifying the rules in a social media policy. They should also anticipate learning and benefiting from inspiring stories from peers.

The Walk Stage

Nonprofits in this stage are using several social media channels consistently, but may not be strategic or fully embracing best practices — maybe they don’t engage with users, or they only share content and messaging produced by their own organization. These nonprofits need to create a social media strategy to support short- and long-term objectives, such as policy change or increasing public engagement on an issue. Walkers internalize listening, and use the data they collect to improve engagement and some content best practices.

These organizations implement small, low-risk projects that collect stories, learning, and metrics to help leadership better understand the value, benefits, and costs. Walkers should focus on one or two social media tools, going deep into tactics and generating tangible results and lessons. They must identify low-cost ways to build capacity internally, such as integrating social media responsibilities into existing staff jobs. Capacity is built with support from leadership and a social media policy formalizes the value and vision.

The Run Stage

Runners use more than two social media channels as part of an integrated strategy, identifying key result areas and metrics that drive everything they do. They have a formal ladder of engagement that illustrates how supporters move from just hearing about your organization to actively engaging, volunteering, or donating to your organization. This is used to guide strategy and measurement. They visualize their networks and measure relationships. These organizations practice basic measurement religiously and use data to make decisions about social media best practices.

To build internal capacity, runners invest in a community manager whose job it is to build relationships with people in social media or on emerging platforms. These organizations know how to create great content, and use an editorial calendar to coordinate and curate content across channels. They are routinely tracking the performance of their content strategy, and they make adjustments based on measurement.

The Fly Stage

These organizations have institutionalized everything in the running stage. Flyers embrace failure and success alike, and learn from both. Flyers are part of a vibrant network of people and organizations all focused on social change. They use sophisticated measurement techniques, tools, and processes.

Do you lead your nonprofit with a network mindset? Where is your organization in the shift to becoming a networked nonprofit? What do you need to get to the next level?

This is a guest contribution by Beth Kanter. Named one of the most influential women in technology by Fast Company and one of the BusinessWeek’s “Voices of Innovation for Social Media,” Beth Kanter is the co-author of Measuring the Networked Nonprofit, and writes Beth’s Blog.

As a social media user, do you find yourself in a different frame of mind when you log in to a personal social network like Pinterest compared to a more professional social network like LinkedIn? Whether you realize it or not, you probably are, according to LinkedIn and TNS’s new study of 6,000+ social media users across 12 countries, aimed at uncovering how marketers can tap into users’ different mindsets on personal and professional social networks. Get ready. Things are about to get a little psychological on the blog.

Marketing to the Mindset

The new research emphasizes the concept of “The Mindset Divide,” that social networkers have different needs, interests, and emotional drivers that put them in a particular frame of mind depending on which type of social networking — personal or professional — they’re engaging in. And as a result, marketers must make an effort to understand what these different mindsets are so they can better align their social media marketing strategies and tactics with their audience’s frame of mind on different social networks. In other words, we must learn to “market to the mindset.”

To us, this makes perfect sense. It’s pretty easy to understand how someone logging in to Facebook to connect with their friends from high school would be in a different frame of mind than if they were logging in to LinkedIn, where their goal might be to gather information and insights to help them in their career.

Key Research Findings

Curious about what the study revealed? Check out LinkedIn’s infographic below, which highlights some of the most interesting tidbits.

(Click infographic to enlarge.)

Applying Mindsets to Your Social Media Marketing Strategy

So how should this research apply to your own social media marketing strategy? In essence, the key is to adapt your marketing to the way people use different types of social networks, in terms of variables like messaging, positioning, the types of content and information you share, and the tone of voice you use.

According to the report, “professional” and “personal” social networks were classified in the following way, based on how survey respondents identified the majority of their connections:

Professional Networks: Linkedin, BranchOut, BeKnown, Viadeo, Xing

Personal Networks: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Orkut

One of the most useful nuggets of information from the study is the following, which highlights the type of content people expect from personal social networks (left) vs. the content they expect from professional social networks (right):

Knowing this information, you might tailor your messaging on personal social networks to be more entertaining, casual, and focused on the interests of your audience rather than being heavily brand-focused. On the other hand, for a professional social network like LinkedIn, you’d probably want your updates to be more industry-focused and brand-centric.

That being said, it’s important to recognize that while the report classifies individual social networks as “personal” or “professional,” that’s not to say that all users are using a particular social network exclusively in one particular way. Sure, you could assume that a site like LinkedIn is being used more exclusively as a professional social network, and besides marketers, users of a site like Pinterest probably aren’t users for any reason other than for personal use, but the lines are certainly a bit blurrier for other social networks like Twitter and Facebook. From a personal perspective, I mainly use Twitter for professional networking, and I use Facebook for a combination of the two.

So while it’s definitely beneficial to understand the general mindsets and emotional drivers for usage of a particular social network, keep in mind that the specific mindsets of your own particular audience should be the ultimate foundation of your strategic social media marketing decisions on a given social network. Experiment with different types of updates, track your analytics, and let the data about what works and what doesn’t drive your social media marketing decision-making.

What do you think of LinkedIn’s new research? How will you use it to adapt your social media marketing strategy?